I am about to develop some web services and I am trying to decide which of jboss's approach to web services I should use. I am wondering if anyone might point me to some good commentary on the pros and cons of JBoss.net vs. JbossWS. Or, am I getting it all wrong and they somehow complement each other? Or, do I have it still wrong and one was the old way and one is now the new way?

I had the same question in my head a few weeks ago. They sent me to incomplete FAQ's and other barely useful pages. I wish someone had just answer the question. I think is a very simple and important question.

We have been using Jboss.net for a year or so, and were about to update to the latest version of Jboss. So, do we go for 3.2.6 or 4? We tried 4 with JbossWS. This is my advice:

Jboss.net: It works well. It is a more mature module, which means that it has been tested in production and has a few tools in place to help you develop your web services. On the other hand, it is not following the J2EE web services specifications. It is a JBoss-only approach to web services.

JbossWS: Done to comply with J2EE in version 4. The main issue I can tell by experience is that it doesn't have the tools to help out with the many descriptors files that are required.

Bottomline: Do you feel like a beta tester? Do you like to write by hand a pile of .xml files with cryptic code? Go for JBossWS. Are you using ant and xdoclet? Would you like to expose one method of you bean by simply adding a tag to it? Use Jboss.net.JbossWS will be the right choice in the future. Right now, stick to Jboss.net .